There’s a growing consensus within the sprinting world that 200- and 400-meter sprinters have an advantange in the outer lanes. Famously, Wayde van Niekerk ran his world record 400m out of lane 8, and Karsten Warholm is known for preferring lane 7.

Surprisingly for such a data-driven culture, there’s almost nothing in the current literature to back this up. So, using data from Diamond League results from 2015-2021, I estimated the effect of lane assignment on elite male sprinters in the 200m, and found that the advantage per lane was about 0.018 seconds—meaning that outdoor 200m sprinters in lane 9 have an advantage of 0.14s over those in lane 1.

I made the trek out to Nashville last weekend for the Vanderbilt Invitational. Although Atlanta doesn’t have any indoor tracks, it’s nice that it’s within a couple hours driving of quite a few.

Because I only got in to Tennessee on Friday morning, I decided to focus on the 60m (and skip the 200m which was held Friday night). Like last week, I trained normally throughout the week. My goal was to get a bit more race experience and see if my PR effort from last week was repeatable.

I opened my 2022 season at the UAB Vulcan Invitational in Birmingham, Alabama last weekend, competing in the 60m and 200m. It was my first time at that facility and my first indoor meet since college. Racing indoors is always special for me as a California native—I love how crowd noise is amplified by echoes, slamming into the wall at the end of a 60, running on a bank, just all of it.

The Crossplex in Birmingham is an excellent facility, and UAB did a great job running the meet—big props to them. For the first time indoors, I had access to a separate warmup track with starting blocks. The meet itself was quick and efficient; every event happened exactly according to schedule.

Since this meet was just an opener for me, I treated it more like a workout than competition, and trained through it. I didn’t have a ton of expectations going in to the meet.

Now that it’s 2022, I’ve scored my 2021 predictions. To get slightly bigger samples, I inverted the prediction and predicted probability of <50% predictions—e.g. “Democrats win both Georgia seats: 25%” became “Democrats do not win both Georgia seats: 75%” for scoring purposes.

November was… busy. December will be too.

Goal Tracking

• 🟡 Get 1% faster.
• 🔴 50% less discretionary spending. I spent about twice as much this month as my average in 2020—between holiday flights, a trip to New York, and Black Friday, I blew my spending record for the year out of the water.
• 🟡 One hour of solitary free time a day.
• 🟡 Twice-weekly live conversations with friends.